How I deal with people at parties who assume I’m rich – Episode 3

‘Retirement’ is the theme of the draft script for a new The Truth Lies in Bedtime Stories podcast series. Episode 3 : ‘Retired’.

For Episode 1 ‘Coming Out’ and Episode 2 ‘How I Became A Full-Time Activist’ here.

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Retired?

At 59, I’m porkier than in my prime, but I still look young for my age. 

My hair is greying, but I still have plenty of it. 

My demeanour and body language suggest, even to people I’ve just met at parties, the kind of energy, drive and purpose we don’t associate with old age pensioners.

In short, I don’t look like I’m Retired. 

When people at parties ask what I ‘do’, they expect the kind of answer that used to appear in passports under ‘occupation’: accountant, plumber, banker, sailor, toolmaker.

Occupied?

A student friend of mine once convinced the Passport Office to print his Occupation as ‘hot air balloonist’. He reckoned it could be a useful first line of defence if he ever needed a plausible excuse for being found somewhere he shouldn’t be.

The Passport Office clung on to the idea that ‘occupation’ is a fixed status, unchanging from cradle to grave, well beyond the feudal era when it was true de jure, or the Industrial Revolution when it was generally true de facto. 

I reckon it must have been some time in the 1980s that they finally dropped using ‘Occupation’ as a personal identifier. I remember my first passport describing me as a ‘student’, but never again having to pause to consider what I ‘was’, for passport purposes.

As I’ve changed careers a few times, and often ‘been’ more than one thing at the same time, I would have remembered being challenged to predict my employment category for any decade-long period between renewals.

It’s amazing that the Passport Office persisted with this bureaucratic relic for so long. Presumably, when the first modern passports were issued after the First World War, ‘Occupation’ was a meaningful identifier. I imagine early categories might have been ‘Gentleman’, ‘Peer of the realm’ or ‘Professor of natural philosophy’.

Our passports now identify us as individuals with biometric information, like our physiognomy, skin or eye colour, or height. Remarkable that our ‘Occupation’ was ever considered to be equally immutable, or that we’d just take someone’s word for it. 

We can all check someone’s eye colour or height. So far as I know, my friend had never even been in a hot air balloon… 

Modern society has rendered ‘Occupation’ obsolete as a meaningful identifier for various reasons:

• There are more different types of jobs. 
• Categories are less obvious, and in any case entire classes of employment can appear and disappear within a generation. Today’s ‘content providers’ may become tomorrow’s lamplighters.
• People are now more likely to change jobs, or have more than one job.
• We’re less inclined to define ourselves by our jobs, and more inclined to self-identify in different ways, many of them novel.

Preoccupied with occupation

Did you notice that I just substituted the words ‘employment’ and ‘job’ for ‘occupation’?

No reason why you should, but since coming out as an activist, I’ve become acutely aware of the difference. 

The more I think about it, the odder it gets.

An ‘occupation’, merely ‘occupies’ you. An occupation is an activity that holds your attention. A toddler at a nursery is ‘occupied’ by sticking pasta shapes onto cardboard. A pensioner in a care home is ‘occupied’ by a jigsaw puzzle. Occupations while away the hours that separate us from our final breath. 

• ‘Occupy’ a country, and you’ve just inflicted total military defeat and national humiliation.
• ’Occupy’ a public toilet, and you’ve flicked a switch from green to red.
• Leave a property, and you turn it from ‘occupied’ to ‘unoccupied’.
• Add a prefix, and being ‘preoccupied’ becomes a bad thing. 

What’s the opposite of having an ‘occupation’? 

Are retired people ‘vacant’, like public toilets? Or ‘unoccupied’, like houses?

Retirement: a brief history

Do you think of retirement as an absence of something, or as something positive? 

Attitudes to ‘retirement’ have been shifting from the moment the British government introduced its first pension, 8 years after Queen Victoria’s death.

In 1909, British life expectancy at birth was 52 years. Less than 5% of the population had made it to the pension’s 70-year threshold. Few of those that qualified for the five shillings a week (less if they were deemed to possess too much furniture) expected to enjoy its benefits for much longer before they died. 

It was an Edwardian token of appreciation for a lifetime of hard toil, to ease the final furlong before it took its final toll.

Not all the inter-war generation, imbued with Victorian virtues of Hard Work and the Devil making work for Idle Hands, welcomed the notion of retirement. 

A friend’s family folklore tells of her grandmother, still working as a dinner lady at a hospital in the 1970s, who furiously binned a bunch of flowers a well-meaning niece had sent to her workplace as a birthday present. She was afraid it might encourage her employers to look up how old she actually was, and realise she was already several years past retirement age. 

These days, of course, a computer would have flagged this well in advance, but these days it’s hard to imagine anyone still clinging so hard to the status granted by employment, and resenting so bitterly the stigma of ‘retirement’. 

Retirement today: the young

What does ‘Retirement’ mean for people I meet at parties these days? 

Much depends on their age. 

Young people have always found the notion of paying into a pension weird. For me it’s now a distant memory. The day in 1991 when, inspired by that grey-haired gentleman activist in the tweed jacket, I quit my job, was the last day I paid into a pension fund.

I do remember looking at the deduction from my payslip, in my early 20s, and struggling to imagine myself ever spending this money in some invisible world four decades beyond the horizon. 

I quit my corporate job in the summer of 1991. The Berlin Wall had fallen, but not the Soviet Union. I’d grown up with The Cold War seeming permanent and intractable, the tick of the nuclear clock loud in my ears. 

Had you asked me to imagine what the world would look like when I was 59, I’d have used the monochrome palette of a nuclear winter, rather than the warm tones of the autumn of our lives, used in TV commercials.

I can’t think of any 20-year-old I’ve met today who imagines the 2060s, when their pension plans will pay out, any more positively.  

The nuclear threat still hangs over us, but for my daughters’ generation, in their 20s, nuclear armageddon, deliberate or accidental, is just one feature of the polycrisis we’ve bequeathed them.

Retirement today: the middle-aged

What of the middle-aged people I meet at parties?

For a start – what is middle age? Its upper limit seems to be relentlessly creeping higher, making it a delicate matter for those who, while clearly no longer ‘young’, decline to define themselves as ‘old’. I’ve met people in the 70s who’ve taken umbrage when I implied they were ‘old’, as if it meant ‘dead’.

Between you and me, then, let’s define middle-aged as between 40 and 65. 

What impression do people of this age give me of their attitude to retirement, as we exchange pleasantries and small talk over drinks and nibbles?

Most say they don’t particularly enjoy their jobs. Few give the impression they love what they do. I can’t remember anyone ever echoing my Dad’s amazement that he got paid for doing what he loved, so if such people still exist, they’re rare.

Even the middle-aged people I meet who are positive about their jobs look forward to the prospect of not working with anticipation rather than dread. Many say they ‘can’t wait’, even though they’ve just told me exactly how many years or months separate them from their first pension payment.

The closer they are to the magical Retirement Age, the more precisely they can sketch the outlines of the promised land. 

It’s taken for granted that Retirement is the pay-off, the final harvest of the fruits of their decades of employment. 

I don’t meet many people who claim to be religious these days, but the middle-aged people I talk to make retirement sound like a secular version of a believer’s vision of Heaven.  

For them, retirement seems like a reward for a virtuous life, their prize for decades resisting the sin of unemployment and temptation of debt.

Retirement today: the old

When I meet actual retirees at parties, their middle-aged children’s vision of retirement as an earthly paradise makes sense. 

Today’s retirees have passed through the secular Pearly Gates, and are more than happy to describe the paradise beyond. 

Retirement, it turns out, is indeed an earthly paradise, at least for those enjoying the blessed trinity of being asset-rich, time-rich and healthy enough to spend their passive income on holidays and hobbies rather than health care. 

You don’t tend to meet the retirees burdened by debt, benighted by ill-health, or battling with pension credit at parties.

Yet retirement has come a long way since 1909. When Britain issued its first modern-style passport in 1915, 6 years after paying its first modern pension, I’m guessing no one back then listed their Occupation as ‘Retired’.

The term is obsolete. I’ve yet to meet a retired person who admits to being ‘unoccupied’, in the sense of having nothing to do. 

Most make a point of telling me ‘they’ve never been busier’. They rattle off calendars crammed with ‘grandparent duties’ and other family commitments, hobbies, long-anticipated travel, and voluntary work. 

These days, it seems, to be ‘retired’ is to live in a quantum state of being both occupied and unoccupied at the same time.

My retirement problem

Bureaucrats may have long abandoned defining us by the nature of our employment, but, as I’ve discovered since coming out as a full-time activist, employment status remains critical to pigeonholing people.   

I’m talking about ‘Retirement’ – what it means to us, to others and to society in general.

There’s a very clear dividing line separating ‘voluntary work’ – one of the acceptable ‘occupations’ to occupy retirees – from ‘activism’, which for many people, I’ve learned, isn’t.

Until I came out and defined myself as an activist, I was unaware of this contradiction. 

Had I not made this late-career choice, I would never have given the matter of retirement so much thought. 

If you’ve thought everything I’ve said so far on the subject is pretty obvious, my naivite may be excused by my upbringing. I don’t remember ‘retirement’ being mentioned as I was growing up.

My father would tell my siblings and me he couldn’t quite believe he was getting paid to be a neurologist. It came as some surprise to me, to learn that most grown-ups don’t particularly like their jobs. Many hate them. 

They would probably have spoken to their children about the prospect of ‘retirement’ more often, and with greater enthusiasm, than my Dad did to me. Like most mothers in the 60s and 70s, my Mum didn’t have a job, so the issue of retirement was moot for her.

My own working life – four years working for a foreign company in Britain, a decade working for foreign employers overseas, followed by two decades of self-employment in the UK – has left me with the same pension I had when I left my first employers in 1991.  

With no pension to speak of, I rarely do. Why would someone with no pension, who managed to make a living from doing things he enjoyed, and never heard any mention of retirement growing up, think much about it?

I recognise this is not typical. It would probably take someone as naive about retirement as me to even notice, let alone be so shocked, when people at parties started mentioning the ‘R’ word even though I never bring it up.

This issue with retirement is purely mine.

At least, that’s what I started out thinking, when I came out as an activist 4 years ago.

The R-Bomb

Here’s what’s happened for the past four years, since I took up full-time activism. 

I meet someone at a party. After some small talk, and often after they’ve told me what they do, at some point, they ask what it is that I ‘do’. 

Given my appearance – girth porky but perky, bonce greying but plentiful – it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assume I must still ‘do’ something.

When I reply, I briefly outline the nature of my activism. 

In response, I’m nearly always asked how long I’ve been doing it. I say some version of ‘since I stopped trying to make a living x years ago, and started being a full time activist’.

If you’d met me, what would you now say? 

If I’d just met me, my next question would be to return to the activism that had so obsessed this other person that they were now doing it full-time. I might say something like:

‘Wow, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who’s completely abandoned making a living in order to promote that cause’.

Or I might seek clarity on the exact nature of the activism, to make sure I understand what we were talking about. I might say something like 

‘I hope this doesn’t sound too offensive, ignorant or insensitive, but am I right in understanding what you do is blah blah blah?’.

Or my next question might be to gently interrogate the root cause of this person’s zeal for this particular form of activism.

‘Why do you, in particular’, I might ask, ‘feel so strongly about this particular issue that you’ve decided to devote your energies full-time to addressing it?’.

If I had no questions about the nature of their activism, I’d be curious about how my new acquaintance hoped becoming a full-time activist might further their goal. 

‘Do you have specific goals and timelines?’, I might ask. ‘How do you measure success or failure?’.  ‘What gets you out of bed every morning, if no one’s paying you to be an activist?

But that’s not what most people say to me.

At this point, around 80-90% of people enquire how I ‘make a living’. Sometimes they’ll say things like, ‘how do you feed yourself?’, or ‘how do you pay the mortgage?’, ‘how do you monetise that?’. Often, they simply ask ‘how do you earn money?’. 

I reply:

‘I don’t’.

You should be able to guess by now, but the next thing I hear isn’t a question, but an assertion.

They drop the R-Bomb

R-Bomb fallout

The R-bomb has become so predictable, I brace myself in anticipation. I may now even visibly wince as the words form and are dropped on me:

‘Oh, so you’re Retired!’

They say this in the tone of someone who’s just puzzled out the answer to a riddle, or rumbled a subterfuge. 

Either way, it answers the question that had actually been forming in their heads while I was wibbling on about my activism.

It turns out that what was going through their heads was nothing to do with my activism, and everything to do with my decision to abandon paid work to do it full time. 

This is why I’ve since reflected so much on what we actually mean when we use words like ‘occupation’, ‘employment’ or even ‘job.  It’s all about the Money.

The word ‘money’ is absent, but implicit, in all these terms. They are euphemisms for talking about money without talking about money.

Would I have been able to smuggle this ‘occupation’ past the old Passport Office, like my hot air balloonist friend, if I’d tried to list my occupation as ‘Activist’?

Why does no one interrupt a retiree, listing their busier-than-ever activities, to ask how they can afford it?

Why does a 65-year-old who includes reading to primary school kids, working at a food bank, or baking cakes for the local hospice fundraiser, not get asked how they can afford to do such things?

Why does a 59-year-old, however perky and luxuriantly-coiffed, need to be pigeonholed as ‘Retired’?

In short, what’s the difference between taking part in an activity, and being an activist, and why does it matter so much to so many people?

At first, I was apologetic. ‘Yes, I suppose am!’, I’d say with an amused smile, as if the thought had only just occurred to me.

But gradually, I started to resent this. Why, of all the things they could have said, did they immediately try to frame my activism in money terms?

Switching the focus from what I clearly cared about – enough to give up paid work to become a full time activist – to what they clearly cared about – how I could afford to do so, gradually started to look like an attempt to undermine my decision, and by extension to trivialise the cause for which I’d chosen to be an activist.

By seeking to explain how I could afford to be an activist – ‘retirement’ – they were relegating my life-changing decision to the status of retirement hobby.

Dropping the R-bomb made my activism, and all my reasons for turning my life upside down,, a whim. Pigeonholing me as a ‘retiree’ turned my soberly considered calculation that I now had  ‘enough’ money to upgrade my lifetime of suppressed concern to full-time activism, into a minor lifestyle choice.

I began to resent the R-bomb. I didn’t, and still don’t, blame those who drop it as being deliberately offensive. They’d be appalled to think so. They were just continuing to make polite small talk in a rapidly-changing environment. 

I’m writing this for the benefit of anyone who may have said such things – including the pre-activist me – to unpack the fallout of the casually deployed R-bomb, unintended though it may be.

I see my party interlocutors not as vindictive bomber pilots pressing the missile launch button, but as innocent mules packed with booby-traps, slapped on the rump by unseen hands and sent, tick-tocking, towards enemy lines. 

This is for any curious mule. 

• What are the booby traps?
• Who might have prepared them?
• Whose are the unseen hands that slapped them on the rump?
• Why it was necessary to deploy them?

Over the next few episodes, I’ll explain how my reaction to these kind of party conversations have evolved over the past four years, 

It’s only fair to warn you that the Retirement thing is not the most annoying, uninteresting, or even the most predictable thing people say when I tell them I’m a late-blooming activist. 

The R-Bomb is just the precursor, the first volley, deployed to soften up the enemy, ahead of the P-Bomb.

In Episode 4, ‘Privileged’, SternWriter addresses the really annoying thing that people say to him at parties.

If you’re curious how stories like this can further the See Through Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, the podcast’s carbon-reducing mechanism is explained in this article, and demonstrated in any See Through podcast.

The same ‘transparent Trojan Horse’ technique is deployed whether a Truth Lies podcast (entirely true, largely) or a See Through Prod-cast (entirely true, full stop).